[Q&A Coffee Break] 07/25/23, 8am PST: Deliverability & Bots, Featuring Marketo Engage Champions!

[Jon_Chen]

Our third Adobe Marketo Engage Community Q&A Coffee Break featuring Marketo Engage Champions @Beth_Massura and @Ajay_Sarpal2 is now OVER. Thanks to all who attended or asked a question, and we hope to catch you at our next session! 

Email bot activity can artificially inflate email opens and click data, leading to inaccurate metrics and misleading performance analysis. Similarly, mastering email deliverability can help ensure that your marketing campaigns are reaching their intended audience. Learn how to optimize your email marketing campaigns by filtering out email bot activity and improving your email deliverability rate with Marketo Engage Champions and Experts Beth Massura and Ajay Sarpal in our upcoming Coffee Break on July 25^th.

You’ll have the opportunity to ask these two pros about their best and most effective techniques to identify and eliminate false opens and clicks, automate email deliverability management tasks, validate sources for hard and soft bounces, and so much more!

This is a text-only event that takes place only here on the Marketing Nation Community. Post your burning questions, hot tips, key takeaways, and let’s chat about them! Our experts will be interacting live for that hour, but the conversation can continue! 

For some guidance, here are some sample questions you can ask about:

• How do I know if I’m having a deliverability issue in Marketo?
• What are some foundational things I should do to support good deliverability?
• How can I find spam traps in my database?
• How can I stop bots from filling out my forms?
• How can you prevent and reduce bot form fills using Marketo best practices, such as form design, validation, progressive profiling, etc.? How does DMARC help in improving Email Deliverability?
• How to use reCAPTCHA to identify and filter out bot form fills in Marketo?

REQUIREMENTS TO PARTICIPATE 

• Must be signed into the Community during the 1-hour period.
• Must post an Adobe Marketo Engage question or comment on Deliverability and Bots.
• Must tag either or both Champs in your question (@Beth_Massura, @ajay_sarpal5).
• Be sure to periodically REFRESH the page to see new questions and new responses in the thread!
• Please note this is a TEXT-ONLY event, meaning that there will be no webinar, video call, or recording. All questions and answers will occur on this thread!

FEATURED EXPERTS

Ajay Sarpal

Ajay Sarpal is a 4x Adobe Marketo Engage Champion and Co-Leader of Virtual Marketo Measure User Group and India Virtual Marketo Engage User Group. He has 9 advanced specializations on Marketing Automation and is ambidextrous in fixing broken Martech processes and bringing transparency/accountability on multi-channel Marketing revenue influence reports. Ajay is also a 3x Subject Matter Expert and a Marketo Certified Solution Architect who can design and implement complex marketing automation solutions. Ajay helps build Adobe Marketo Engage Certification exams (Professional, Expert, and Architect levels) and now runs his own consulting practice assisting clients in accelerating the demand generation and ROI tracking.

Beth Massura

Beth is deeply involved with the Adobe community as a 4x Marketo Engage Champion, Certified Master and Subject Matter Expert for the credential program. She has a passion for identifying opportunities to increase efficiency and effectiveness within the marketing environment. As a Senior Marketing Operations Consultant, she works with a variety of clients to troubleshoot and proactively address critical areas such as deliverability and database health.

[larsonian]

Thanks for the tip  @AjayS 

[traba5058]

Hi @Beth_Massura, @ajay_sarpal5

Why can't Marketo's BOT feature take Apple Opens into account?

[nnasrallah]

@Beth_Massura, @ajay_sarpal5
Hello! I have a question around using Marketo's built-in reCaptcha v3...

If we have forms that are external to Marketo, but use the Marketo API to accept new leads from those forms, can the Marketo built-in reCaptcha still be used for those form intakes? 

[AjayS]

Hi, nnasrallah

The built-in reCAPTCHA feature only works for Marketo forms that are embedded on Marketo landing pages or external web pages using the embed code. If you have forms that are external to Marketo and use the Marketo API to accept new leads, you cannot use the built-in reCAPTCHA feature for those forms. However, you can still use Google reCAPTCHA V3 for your external forms.

[traba5058]

Hi @Beth_Massura, @ajay_sarpal5

What is the deciding factor in moving from the shared ip pool to a dedicated ip? We have a dedicated ip in our contract and are trying to determine when to make the switch.

[Beth_Massura]

Hi @traba5058 ,

Dedicated IP addresses require a high send volume (e.g. >200k/month) to keep it "warm enough" as well as a fairly consistent send volume to avoid large spikes in volume flagging the IP. If you are not yet at that point, consider what steps you might need to take organizationally to get there. There is also a warmup process where you send to small audiences only over the course of a couple months; you can't just start sending to a large portion of your database right away. You might want to time the switch to a period that is normally less active/less critical for email campaigns. Also, you would be responsible for troubleshooting and resolving delivery issues on your dedicated IP. You'll want to identify the team/individual who would be able to take this responsibility. Hope this helps!

[AjayS]

Welcome to the Q&A Coffee Break on Deliverability & Bots! We are excited to have you with us and we hope you will enjoy this session.

[stefanipavlova]

@Beth_Massura @Ajay_Sarpal2 

What would be the first step to start increasing our deliverability rate?

[Beth_Massura]

Hi @stefanipavlova , great question! I'd say the best first step is to be as intentional and targeted with your email content and audiences as possible, rather than sending general content to broader audiences. Ultimately, this will have the greatest impact on recipients actually engaging with your content. But also, conducting an audit of your deliverability to date - looking at delivery rates, hard & soft bounces, spam complaints, etc., will provide you with hard data on what technical challenges you may be having.

[BBenemelis]

@Beth_Massura, @ajay_sarpal5) How can you find out about spam complaints?

[AjayS]

@BBenemelis 

This is a great question. Use Revenue Cycle Explorer to get the list of Spam Complaints broken down by email address / Program name / Email name. This is a great way to find out spam complaints.

[stefanipavlova]

Thank you @Beth_Massura  🙂

[Beth_Massura]

Hi everyone! Glad to join you today to answer your questions on deliverability and bots!

[andyh25]

@Beth_Massura @Ajay_Sarpal2 

Would be interested to learn if anyone has used alternatives to Google ReCAPTCHA V3 for their captcha provider. We have a privacy focused team that is not keen on using an advertiser to manage captcha and looking at alternatives like friendly captcha

[AjayS]

Hi, @andyh25 

If you are not using ReCAPTCHA v3, you may be exposing your Marketo forms to bots and spam, which can affect your email deliverability, performance, and reputation. Therefore, you should use some alternative methods to protect your forms from bots and spam.

One possible alternative is to use Honeypot and Akismet Anti-Spam if you are using WordPress CMS and your Marketo forms are hosted on WordPress. Honeypot is a simple and lightweight anti-spam technique that involves adding a hidden field to your form that is visible only to bots but not to humans. If the hidden field is filled out, it means that the submission is from a bot and can be rejected or ignored. You can implement this technique using CSS or JavaScript on your form. Akismet Anti-Spam is a WordPress plugin that checks your form submissions against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can install and activate the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin from the WordPress plugin directory.

[aWyskiel]

@Ajay_Sarpal5 @Beth_Massura 

Based on the analysis made on our Newsletter programs, BOT activity is inflating our click rate metrics. We noticed a strong engagement in all email metrics where almost in all cases 75% of clicks to preheader (first link in email) with marginal engagement with all other content. Our preheader looks like unlined standard text, so in our opinion the possibility that a real person clicks on it is very low.

Solutions that we already tried to improve our bot management:

1. Marketo bot activity feature - we enabled the option to Log Bot Activity. This option is not working for us as only a small percentage of bots are flagged correctly. 
2. We implemented a hidden link at the top of email to capture bots that click at the first link in the email. This internal solution together with updating the list of IPs on Marketo side (16 additional IPs addresses blocklisted) seems to have worked for us. Unfortunately after reverting the changes by removing the 16 identified IPs from the blocklist (ref link), we observed the bot clicks increase again.

Could you please advise how we can improve our bot management and exclude them from the click metrics? 

[Beth_Massura]

Hi @aWyskiel ,

The out-of-the-box Marketo bot filter is mostly based on a specific list of known bot IPs. However, a lot of companies have legitimate email scanners that check the links for safety before delivering to the intended recipient and these would not be logged by that option. Do you have "log bot activity" selected for both the "Match with IAB List" and "Match with Proximity Pattern"?

[aWyskiel]

Hi @Beth_Massura we are filtering Bot activities for both - IAB list and Proximity Pattern

[David_Lyons]

@Beth_Massura  and @Ajay_Sarpal5 can I configure email performance reports to better reflect human click activity and not destination servers checking links immediately upon delivery? If not, is there a good ratio to apply to the performance report click/open counts to manually calculate a more realistic click/open rate?

[Beth_Massura]

Hi @David_Lyons and @Emily_Bright ,

This is a great question, and truly a challenge. Out of the box, the email performance reports offer general open/click activity and there isn't a specific setting you could use to immediately filter the reports as described. I haven't come across any general/industry ratios to use to help calculate a "realistic" open/click rate.

Here are a couple ideas to look into and develop further:

• Add a hidden link in the email (such as a linked 1x1 pixel) that would not be clicked by a human and use that to filter out bots/email scanners from the report. However, a real person who clicked the email after the email scanner initially did would also be filtered out. You might be able to incorporate a timeframe to exclude only the first (bot/scanner) click - e.g. any clicks within x minutes of the hidden link click should not be counted, but after x minutes they could, but this might require complex data manipulation outside Marketo.
• If you have a data warehouse and a data analysis team, perhaps they could use the Marketo activity data to develop models to make a best guess as to whether it was a real person vs. a bot/scanner.

[David_Lyons]

Thank you @Beth_Massura for the options. We haven't tried the hidden 1-pixel link yet. We've tried working with the timing, but the order of delivery/click isn't consistent so we missed excluding some server clicks. It's worth trying again.